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Should We Jump Ship From Facebook to Google Plus?

Is It Possible To Convert From Facebook to Google Plus? It's a good question and with all the modifications Facebook has been making to its platform, well, it's really looking like a good idea.

To be honest, anything is possible, but with how deep Facebook has its fingers in our lives, it may be tougher than you think. But as they continue to muck with our feeds, notifications, and removing the 'Trending Topics' column, it's becoming less and less useful. Kind of like how My Space faded out as it became less useful to it's initial customer base.

In review, our "news" feeds are a real bitch to keep updated with the latest updates we want to see as Facebook continues to force 'Top Stories' on us,. Or what they consider is what we need to see. Hell, right now my wife is trying to pull up 'Most Recent' on her phone and even that is f*ing up. I mean, how is it 'Most Recent' when you have posts from the night before at the top of your feed?

I'm getting tired of seeing posts in my feed that were more relevant two days ago than it is today because someone commented on the post about that accident on your commute two days ago.

Facebook has claimed to retool the feeds so we see more friends that Pages, but I'm not sure what their angle is for retaining advertiser dollars if we don't see the pages we to follow.

Then Facebook removed the 'Trending Topics' column. To be honest, for me, Trending Topics delivered the most relevant news of the moment, skipping over all the cute cat videos we follow.

Why would they remove the latest news from our feed? They removed one of the more useful functions of the site. The other day there was a school shooting in the headlines that I had no clue took place because my Facebook feed was nothing but cute animal videos and other crap that did not matter. Had I had the 'Trending Topics' column, I would have seen this headline. Heck even the news pages I follow didn't show up in my feed with their headlines. I found that rather curious.

What's more curious is after I went on an FB feed rant about not seeing any of the news pages that I subscribe to, I'm now seeing all my CNN, ABC and NBC news page posts in my feed. Weird or "coincidental," that's for sure.

But then, if you remember, after time we only see about 10-20% of the Pages we follow. Then I further discovered that of the pages I follow and still actually get notifications from, I'm only seeing about 25% of their posts. Wow.

Hey Facebook... what's best for us is that we see posts from what we choose to follow, or who we choose to friend. (Yes, they cull friend feeds too).

So when you post content, whether it be to a page or your own wall for others to see, unless you tag folks specifically that you want to see your posts, don't hold your breath. It's pretty disappointing actually, and to be honest, frustrating that Facebook plays a dictatorship role about our own feeds.

Oh, and don't get me started about when you talk about something around your phone that you've never web surfed for, then within the hour, start seeing ads for it on your FB feed.

NOW on the flip side -

If Facebook were like Twitter, and you're following 500 pages and have 500 friends, there would be a lot of crap you won't see because you follow so much stuff. Sure, FB filters our feeds, but I'd rather that we filter our own feeds our way, not their way.

Why not give us everything we follow... populate the top third of our feed with whatever they think is their most important shit, then let us scroll through our hundreds upon hundreds of posts from all the pages we follow.

OR BETTER YET, if you have to filter, then filter, but show us at least the latest post of any page we follow, with a link to visit the rest of that page's feed.

Can we Move to Google Plus?

Either way, I'm starting to have more and more days where I spend time on Google Plus and I am giving serious consideration to migrating to Google Plus altogether. As far as I know, Google Plus does not filter our feeds and feels easier to use. But I cannot deny if they do filter feeds. I'm looking at that now. Some of my peers say that Plus has its own issues with advertisers and filtered feeds, but I'm not as knee deep into it to notice this. Yet.

Either way, as time goes on, folks are slowly getting sick of Facebook... advertising monies are quietly declining, the app listens to you on your phone (while they deny it) and to be honest, everything has a cycle. Rome did not perish in a day, it took time. and possibly, some day, maybe FB will perish too and we'll all find another venue to share useless cat videos every day and beat our own chests talking about ourselves!